Page 25 of Trade
Instead, I say, “I didn’t really want to do it in the first place.”
He gets very quiet. He keeps holding the pecans, but he doesn’t take any more.
I glance over. His face is still hard. No shame. No anger either. He glances back at me. He really is astonishingly beautiful and so damn young. Is that why I can’t seem to say the smart thing?
“What would make you want to do it?”
“Like how many water purification tablets would it take?” I snort.
He kind of shrugs and waits for me to answer.
“You can’t trade for that.”
“Do you have a man? Inside?” His jaw hardens. His gaze narrows.
“I did. I had a husband.”
“Is he dead?”
I shake my head and take a pecan. I can’t taste it now, but it gives my teeth something to grind.
“What happened to him?”
“He traded up.” I swig from the canteen. Dalton waits for me to explain. “He got a woman we worked with pregnant, so he’s with her now, and I’m”—I gesture around—“Outside.”
He chews on this in silence for a while. I polish off the pecans.
“What’s wrong with him?” he finally asks. The question is absolutely genuine.
I smile for a split second. His attention immediately locks in on my lips.
“I don’t know. Maybe the walls were closing in on him.”
“What’s that mean?”
“Maybe he got bored. He wanted more.”
Dalton is not understanding. His beautiful mouth turns down at the corners. “How many women are in the mountain?”
He must mean the bunker. It feels like information I shouldn’t share—like what Gary Krause was worried about when he said I couldn’t talk. But what is this kid going to do with his backpack and canteen?
“A little more than a thousand.”
His pupils widen. “A thousand?”
“Yeah. How many women are there on the Outside?” The wilderness around us feels empty except for birds and small creatures in the undergrowth, but there must be people. It was a long gap between the last lottery and mine, but sometimes they come in a rush. Once a week even. They can’t all be the same men. Not if it costs a hundred barrels of oil for one of us.
“There are fifty or so in the compound at the Mill. Some of the farm collectives have a few. Maybe seventy-five or eighty total in a hundred square miles. People who have one don’t advertise, so maybe more.”
None of this jibes with what I know. The Outside is barren and incapable of sustaining life, and Outsiders are the roaches who survived the End. They comb the wreckage of the world and bring us what they find in exchange for women, who for some reason have always been currency, in the Before and now. Unspoken, there was the idea that the DNA of roaches must be hardy, and isn’t biodiversity good for an ecosystem?
In the back of my mind, that was the thought that nagged me when I went to a woman with the special tea Dad taught me how to brew. The bunker’s mission is to ensure the survival of the species, so that all of history hasn’t been for naught, and I was dedicated to the mission. A hundred percent. And yet, wasn’t I a mutineer?
I didn’t see it that way. It was only a cup of tea. A small mercy. And after Dad died, an act of memory.
Why did he do it?
Everything used to make sense and now nothing does. My overwrought brain grasps for something solid and catches onto something Dalton said. “What’s the mill?”
